The Oscars, which I’ll watch eventually. Probably.

I have no idea, really, which movie will win the Academy Awards best picture. The way the voting works, with Instant Runoff Voting, makes predicting a little trickier. If there is a movie that is many people’s second or third favorite film, and the first place votes split the right way, a movie with fewer first place votes could nevertheless win the statue. So if The Artist does not win, and I think it will, then I’d expect a picture such as Midnight in Paris, which many people liked, to win. It was my favorite of the seven films I saw, though I did like The Artist, The Descendents, and Moneyball. I liked much of Hugo, though I thought it too long to get started. I enjoyed The Help for what it was. But how Extremely Long and Terribly Annoying got nominated is beyond me; it didn’t even do well with the critics.

“In the months since [Billy] Crystal was announced as this year’s Oscar host — his first such stint in eight years — the general reaction has been somewhere between a shrug and a wince (which, coincidentally, are two of Crystal’s go-to comedic tics).” But Crystal was hired “to perform a sort of public-image triage” after the 1989 “show had opened with an astonishingly taste-deprived musical number in which Rob Lowe, Snow White and several dancers dressed as nightclub tables performed ‘Proud Mary’; check out the link to this bit of Oscar infamy. And he’s in a similar role again.

UPDATE: From the BBC- How to win an Oscar
Roles played by Oscar-winning actors and actresses since 1927